


A Verdant Heart

by PetrichorPerfume



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Awesome Rowena MacLeod, Castiel is a plant, Crack, Crack Treated Seriously, Cursed Castiel (Supernatural), Dean Winchester is Protective of Castiel, Fluff and Crack, Gen, M/M, Magic, Nymphs & Dryads, Oblivious Castiel (Supernatural), Sam Winchester is So Done, Witch Curses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-04 15:55:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21200243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PetrichorPerfume/pseuds/PetrichorPerfume
Summary: Prompt!Fill: "Cas gets turned into a houseplant; cute, emotive, with color changing leaves that reflect his mood; aware, but still a plant.Dean does his best to look after his angel!plant while Sam and Rowena find a way to turn him back."





	1. The Dryad and the Drinking Game

**Author's Note:**

> I saw this prompt and simply couldn't resist. This is total crack. Can be read as Destiel or Gen, depending on the reader's preference. 
> 
> Let me know what you think!

The night they discovered a Dryad in the Bunker, the two of them had been four or five rounds of spirits into a drinking game of Dean’s own devising – one that involved getting as drunk as possible, as quickly as possible. He had shrugged and chalked the whole thing up to mixing whiskey and tequila. Naked women usually only spontaneously appeared in Castiel’s lap in his wildest, most private dreams.

He was about to call it a night when he noticed that Castiel’s eyes were wide and his hands were doing that same thing they’d done that one time they’d went to see a lap dance and the angel hadn’t been quite sure what to do with his extremities.

“Dean?” Castiel asked, voice breaking in the middle.

Dean’s eyes went wide. His drunken mind short-circuited as he tried to assess the situation, including the fact that the nearest weapon was in the next room, but it was increasingly difficult in that the woman began to gyrate, bum bouncing, muscles writhing below her pale skin.

He gave a Castiel ‘what-do-you-want-me-to-do-about-it?’ look, but Castiel wasn’t very good at interpreting those sort of looks, only the kind that said ‘fuck-you’ (but not ‘fuck-me,’ curiously enough) or ‘go-to-Hell’ or ‘incoming-projectiles-get-down!’

“Dean!” the angel repeated, a slightly more desperate tinge to his voice.

The hunter set down his tumbler of whiskey a little too roughly, at which point the naked woman stopped what she was doing and turned to him.

“Do you mind?” She hissed.

Dean considered for a short while. “A little bit, yeah. I mean-”

“Didn’t anyone teach you any manners?” The woman interrupted. “It hurts when you treat me like some sort of object. Or worse yet, _furniture_.”

“Um-” Dean faltered, supremely confused. He rested his elbows on the table with more force than strictly necessary.

“Ow! Would you just listen to me for a moment?” The woman grated out. She turned to Dean, who suddenly had trouble meeting her eyes. “Let me introduce myself. I am your table.”

Dean tore his eyes from her chest with much difficulty, and sighed. “I’m dreaming,” he said. He took another sip of his drink, and set it down carefully this time – just in case.

Then, he smiled. This kind of dream usually ended well for him. (Not for Sam, though, who was generally in charge of household laundry, but that was a story for a different day.)

“What do you say you and me ‘move some furniture around?’” He waggled his eyebrows at the woman, who promptly slapped him.

It hurt, but it also had the effect of sobering him up just enough to realize Castiel was still in the room, and that everything felt just a little too real for him to be dreaming.

He sent Castiel a ‘be-ready’ look, which the angel seemed to understand.

“So. Let me guess. Dryad?”

“Specifically, a Meliad. Guardian of fruit trees. Can you believe they cut my entire grove down?” Her eyes began to darken.

Dean glanced at Castiel, who grossly misinterpreted his ‘is-this-chick-crazy-or-it-just-me?’ look as a ‘strike-now’ look, and it all happened so fast that Dean would have surely attributed the entire incident as a drunken hallucination, if not for clattering of the angel blade to the floor, as well as a heavier plopping sound.

Both the woman and Castiel were gone.

In their place was a small bonsai.

A music laugh sounded from the table, and echoed around the room.

“Cas?” Dean asked, cautiously approaching the plant.

The little blossoms flashed from pink to red.

“Is that you?”

The flowers again changed color.

“Huh.”

This was going to be a hell of a thing to explain to Sam.


	2. Castiel and the Leaves of Many Colors

“So let me get this straight. You were drinking when a Dryad appeared, claiming she was your table, and now Castiel is a-” Sam’s voice trailed off as he searched for the correct word for what Cas now was. “A houseplant,” he settled on.

Castiel’s leaves flushed a deeper shade of green, and Dean frowned. “I think you just insulted him.”

The flowers turned red, which Dean had learned to take as an affirmative. “Yeah. He’s definitely offended.”

Sam threw up his hands in a general I’m-so-_done_-with-you-Dean manner. “Fine. I’ll call Rowena. Maybe there’s some sort of reversal spell, or something...” He cast a disparaging look at Castiel.

He had vague memories of Dean going through a plant phase when they were children. His brother didn’t have what anyone would call a green thumb. In fact, Dean had once somehow managed to keep a cactus alive in one of their motel rooms – for exactly three and a half days.

And though they never mentioned it to anyone, Dean had cried – just a little bit – and Sam had awkwardly patted him on the shoulder while his elder brother grumbled something about cacti being the hardiest plants on Earth.

“Good luck,” Sam whispered to Cas.

The angel-plant’s leaves flashed an alarmed shade of orange, the kind that sometimes precedes the dawn, but Sam was already gone.

“Well, buddy, I guess it’s just you and me,” Dean chuckled, staring down at his angel, whose leaves were fluctuating between blue and red.

“I, um, don’t know that much about plants,” Dean admitted, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He approached Castiel with the same sort of caution with which one might approach a potentially rabid raccoon.

“You’re kind of cute,” he said, reaching out to stroke one of the leaves as if it would bite him. The angel-plant rustled a warning to him, and Dean decided not to find out whether Castiel now had thorns.


	3. Dean and the Not-So-Green Thumb

It had been two days. Sam was drinking increasingly strong cups of coffee. Dean was obsessively trolling plant care forums, literally all of which contained conflicting information about the care of plants, alongside a rather large and unwelcome portion of the forum space reserved for gardeners to insult each other’s methods while claiming theirs were superior by percentages that added up to far more than 100.

Castiel, for his part, had not quite gotten the hang of drinking on Dean’s questionable schedule. He was thirsty half of the time, and felt like he was drowning the other half, neither of which were pleasant experiences. As such, he set his leaves to flash and change every fifteen seconds, a phenomenon which was at once seriously alarming and supremely annoying to Dean, who found that a bunker full of sleepless hunters, one cranky witch, and an irate houseplant/angel did not mix into a well-adjusted family the way it said it should have on the box of Sam’s coffee which Dean was currently pilfering from.

“Make every morning bright,” it screamed out in neon yellow.

“The family that caffeinates together can withstand any weather,” a complementary color on the other side assured him.

“Yeah, right,” Dean huffed.

In truth, he was getting more worried by the hour. Sam and Rowena had yet to find anything useful, and Dean’s faith in his ability to keep Castiel alive was waning.

“If only you could talk,” he lamented to Castiel, who rustled his leaves sympathetically and stopped flashing them for just a few moments.

Dean frowned. “Please don’t die,” he whispered. “I know I’m not the best houseplant parent, but damn it, I’m trying.”

At that, Castiel’s leaves returned to the same verdant green they had originally been.

“Cas?” Dean questioned. “Oh no. Don’t you dare die on me. What do you need? Water? Fertilizer? Sunlight?”

The plant Castiel remained stubbornly still and silent.

Dean shook him a bit, then let out a stream of curses. He stared at Castiel in disbelief.

He’d killed him. The one godforsaken plant that had truly ever mattered to him, and he’d stupidly, stupidly killed it.

He couldn’t help the tears that came, couldn’t stop them from falling on Castiel’s leaves like rain.

He heard his brother call his name, but it didn’t matter – it was already too late.

Sam came barreling in to find his brother angrily wiping away tears, his back to the countertop where the plant had been. Now, a very naked, very dirty Castiel was sitting there, doing that thing with his hands that he did when he wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to be doing with them.

“Sam,” Castiel’s voice came, as his hands flew to cover himself.

“Cas!” Dean spun around, and threw his arms around the angel, heedless of the fact that the other was naked and, quite frankly, filthy.

Rowena rounded the corner, her face buried in a book. “I don’t know if Samuel told you, but the reversal to the curse simply requires a few tears. If either of you could take the liberty of crying over him just a smidgen-” She trailed off as the silence between them grew unbearable.

“Ah,” she said, slamming shut the book. “I see that my services are no longer needed here.” She turned to go, then turned back. “Pity we wasted two days on this foolishness when Dean clearly had a handle on it all along,” she said, shooting the still-hugging angel and hunter a dirty look. “Come along, Samuel.”

Sam followed her like a lost dog, shaking his head just a little as Dean finally released Castiel.

“You’re naked,” Dean realized.

Castiel’s eyes narrowed. “I just spent two days as a plant. Did you expect me to come back clothed?”

Taking a step back to dissolve the tension, Dean just smiled. “It’s good to have you back.”

The angel couldn’t help but smile back.

“Just...” Dean’s eyes slid down the length of Castiel’s body, and lingered there for a moment too long. “Put some clothes on. Please.”

Their eyes met, but Dean couldn’t hold his gaze.

“Dean?” Castiel asked.

“Yes?” Replied the hunter.

“I think we might need a new table.”

The naked Meliad was perched on their table, and gave them a tiny little wave.

Dean threw his hands up in surrender, and gave Cas a ‘you-deal-with-this-I-am-so-done’ look, which the angel promptly misinterpreted.


End file.
